Saturday, May 16, 2015

The nicest surprise is to wake up in the morning and find that overnight your Greenlight has moved upward by a solid percentage. That means while you are sleeping, the rest of the world is looking at Steam and voting for their favorite projects. Steam really is global.

That's been clear from our comments section, where we've gotten a strong showing from the UK and Russia, as well as Germany, Brazil, Italy, Japan — and I'm probably forgetting where else.

We're lucky that TIKI GALORE has very little language in it, so we'll be able to handle translations for any of these countries without much of a problem.

But most of all, we are incredibly fortunate that people from all over the world fantasize about running around on a tropical island, wearing insane Tiki outfits, and killing each other with spears!

Friday, May 15, 2015

We've been strangely fortunate so far with our Greenlight for Tiki Galore because all of our comments have been positive.

Where are the haters? (Not asking for haters! But just a little surprised. Everybody gets haters.)

Here are some favorite comments:

"Looks like the perfect, silly game to have a bunch of laughs while playing with my buddies"

"Glad to see the narrator from Crash Bandicoot got his own game."

"it's original, a fun game from like 2004 that we wish we all had!!!"

"This game has 90s shenanigans written all over it :P"

"Can't wait to get my spear fights on!"

And then there was a comment in Russian:
"Плохая оптимизация, да и ничего особо интересного нет. Но в целом, весьма неплохо!"
Which translates to:
"Poor optimization, and nothing really interesting there. But on the whole, very good!"

So our game is one of those totally uninteresting things that are on the whole very good! Like... um... not sure what else is like that..
It'll be exciting to get more comments. Looking forward to Day 3!

Thursday, May 14, 2015

So this has been an interesting day. We actually launched Tiki Galore a little after midnight PST.

Out of everyone in the studio, I was probably the least cool-headed. Hugh and Chad seemed to adopt an attitude of "We'll just have to wait and see." But I haven't been able to stop pressing Refresh on our Steam page (http://ow.ly/MYzcV) all day, checking for new votes.

I'm not going to get into specific numbers right now. But we woke up this morning at only 2% toward the Top 100. Since then we've come a long way, enough to make me think that maybe it's not so impossible to get Greenlit.

We've been working Twitter (@AbyssStudios), sending out concept art and images captured during gameplay or from Unreal Engine. But I've read other dev blogs that have done a post-Greenlight analysis, and it seems for most of them only about 3% of the actual vote ended up coming from outside Steam.

That means the first few days – while your game is still being promoted by Steam in the recently launched section – are key. That's when you get the most traffic. Then it tends to fall off sharply as your game gets buried in the back pages of endless Greenlight projects.

So despite the fact that our first day was actually really encouraging and all the comments players left were positive, we still have no idea where this is going.

And yet as I tweet out all these images of concept art and game-world stuff from Tiki Galore, I can't help but smile. I mean, come on -- who wouldn't want to battle your friends wearing a mask like this?

Tomorrow we at Abyss are putting up Tiki Galore, our first video game, on Steam Greenlight as part of the approval process required to sell our game in the Steam store.

We'll hand control of our creation over to the votes of fellow gamers and the enigmatic decision-making process at Valve.

We have no idea how things are going to turn out.

During a multiplayer test session, it became clear that our game is actually really super fun to play. And although we have ambitions to create much more complex games with compelling stories, real emotions, and innovative gameplay, there is a lot of satisfaction in making something purely FUN.

We've laughed and cursed at each other while battling in this world. The good time we've had playing Tiki Galore has inspired us to happily imagine cool stuff to add.

That's what we're doing now. Here's a link to our Steam Greenlight page where you can check out our ideas in detail: http://goo.gl/r31dg0

We''ll be writing more here about our experience going through Greenlight and also to let you know more about us.